benjamin
GROSSER

Kanye jumps on board with demetricating Twitter

It’s an interesting moment—at least for me—because we’re starting to see increased calls for hiding the metrics on social media platforms. The latest was Kanye West, who tweeted that “we should be able to participate in social media without having to show how many followers or likes we have … [because these visible metrics have] an intense negative impact on our self worth.” Before Kanye, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, suggested in testimony before the US Congress a couple weeks ago that he’s reconsidering the role of prominent visible follower counts. After Kanye’s tweet, Dorsey wrote Kanye telling him he’s still thinking about it.

Following Kanye’s tweet, New York Magazine wrote about Kanye’s call, and I appreciate that author Madison Malone Kircher foregrounded that I’ve been publicly calling for social media demetrication since 2012—when I created and released the first social media “demetricator” Facebook Demetricator—and have more recently made possible precisely what Kanye wants for Twitter with my Twitter Demetricator:

Metric-free social media isn’t a new concept. Ben Grosser, a professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and artist, created an extension earlier this year called the Twitter Demetricator — an earlier version, the Facebook Demetricator launched in 2012 — which does exactly what West describes. It removes all follower and engagement counts and shows you only a user’s content. Which leaves you to judge that content purely on what you think of it, rather than what you think of it based on what your peers have indicated they think of it. “Without really meaning to, I’d been glossing over tweets that had relatively few likes and paying extra attention to those that had many. I had even subconsciously developed a sort of multiplier for various Twitter users based on the size of their followings, so that a tweet by a relatively obscure user that garnered 10 likes would stand out in my feed more than one by a famous user that got 100 likes,” Will Oremus at Slate wrote when he gave the extension a try. A 2014 academic study from Grosser described how his extensions “both reveals and eases these patterns of prescribed sociality, enabling a social media culture less dependent on quantification.

If only I could get Kanye to tweet out Twitter Demetricator, I suspect the attention it would produce for the idea of a metrics-free Twitter would help push Dorsey to implement what he has so far only spoken about as a future possibility. Heck, Dorsey himself could tweet out Twitter Demetricator as a way of asking for feedback on the idea! While I have no illusions that Facebook will ever hide the metrics, I’m starting to think it’s possible Twitter might do so. Time will tell…

My work Safebook in The Washington Post

Both the Washington Post and Fast Company’s FastCoDesign discussed my latest work Safebook last week.

Abby Ohlheiser (WashPo) said Safebook was my “most drastic transformation of the platform,” diving into questions about what it would take to make Facebook “safe” in her article titled “Maybe the only way to keep Facebook from harming us is to hide everything.”

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan (FastCoDesign), in an article titled “Safebook is Facebook, except totally, gloriously empty,” called Safebook a “half elaborate send-up and half earnest investigation of the social network’s inner mechanisms.” And perhaps my favorite quote in a while: “The internet is a morass of things you don’t want to see, but can’t stop looking at. The artist Ben Grosser has a solution: Safebook.”

Ohlheiser and Campbell-Dollaghan are two of the most thoughtful journalists writing about social media from a critical perspective right now. If you aren’t already reading them, start today.

Several of my works were the subject of an article on Fast Company’s Co.Design

Following up on a previous article that included my work, Fast Company posted a follow-up focused on a number of my works. Titled You Could Delete Your Social Media; You Could Also Turn it Into Art, Co.Design’s Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan wrote:

Install some of Grosser’s work, or listen to him talk about it, and you’ll discover a subtle shift in the way you think about life online. His work wedges itself between your actual identity and your online identity, sometimes creating chaos, other times revealing something about an otherwise inscrutable algorithm.

Campbell-Dollaghan talks about Facebook Demetricator, Go Rando, ScareMail, and Twitter Demetricator, as well as some of my Facebook news feed experiments. It’s a great piece that demonstrates an unusually careful analysis uncommon in the tech-focused press.

Facebook Demetricator, Go Rando, and Textbook in Fast Company Co.Design

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan of Fast Company’s Co.Design, writing about alternatives to #DeleteFacebook, discussed my works Facebook Demetricator, Go Rando, and Textbook. My favorite quote:

[Grosser] built several Chrome extensions that throw Facebook’s carefully honed algorithms into chaos—like lobbing a digital smoke bomb on your News Feed.

Might have to put that in my bio :) Read the full article here.

My Facebook-related works in The Washington Post

In the wake of the latest news about Cambridge Analytica, I spoke with The Washington Post yesterday. In an article titled Facebook is experimenting on you. Here’s how you can run an experiment on it, Abby Ohlheiser wrote:

Moments of crisis like these prompt soul searching. If you’re one of those wondering, in the days since this scandal, why you give so much information to Facebook in the first place — or even if you should quit the site altogether — Grosser has a series of tools that can help you interrogate what it is that Facebook has done to you.

Abby writes a great blog on The Washington Post called The Intersect, examining how the culture of the internet has become an inseparable part of our lives; I recommend you keep an eye on it.

Read the full article: Facebook is experimenting on you. Here’s how you can run an experiment on it.

Twitter Demetricator in Slate

Slate Magazine’s chief technology writer, Will Oremus, wrote an insightful piece analyzing Twitter Demetricator and its effects. Speaking about his initial impressions of Twitter without the metrics:

Without really meaning to, I’d been glossing over tweets that had relatively few likes and paying extra attention to those that had many. I had even subconsciously developed a sort of multiplier for various Twitter users based on the size of their followings, so that a tweet by a relatively obscure user that garnered 10 likes would stand out in my feed more than one by a famous user that got 100 likes. And in threads with lots of replies, I had been checking like counts as though they were an official scorecard of who was “winning” the conversation.

Later, he reflects on his experience:

…you might be surprised at how drastically you can change your Facebook or Twitter experience just by hiding a few little numbers. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to comprehend just how central metrics are to the Twitter experience until you install Demetricator. Only when I tried it did I realize that my eyes were instinctively flicking to a tweet’s retweet and favorite counters before I even processed the tweet itself. Only when I tried Demetricator did I understand how much I relied on those signals to evaluate a tweet—not only its popularity or reach, but its value.

Will contextualizes his impressions within the current moment, when social media companies are under siege for their roles in everything from their effects on mental health to the ways they were weaponized in the recent US election.

I’ve been reading Will’s writing for years, as he’s one of the best journalists out there analyzing technology from a broader perspective. I encourage you to read the whole piece.